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For immediate release
July 14, 2005
For more information, contact:
Jan M. Guszynski
Marketing Director
Tribune Media Services
(312) 222-4717
jguszynski@tribune.com

Tribune Media Services to Launch Sudoku Puzzle in July

Chicago, IL, July 14, 2005 — The Sudoku puzzle that has become a worldwide phenomenon and daily obsession for puzzle aficionados will be syndicated by Tribune Media Services beginning July 18. TMS will distribute the wildly popular version of Sudoku that has captivated readers of The Daily Telegraph in London, and has recently been launched in the Los Angeles Times.

Sudoku, which became a national craze in Japan and spread to the U.K. last year, is a generic title for the grid-based logic game. It uses numbers but is not a mathematical puzzle. A Sudoku puzzle consists of a 9-by-9 grid that has been subdivided into 9 smaller grids of 3-by-3 squares. Each puzzle has a logical and unique solution. To solve the puzzle, each row, column and 3-by-3 box must contain each of the numbers 1 to 9. Samples will be available at www.tmsfeatures.com beginning July 18.
"There are lots of editions of Sudoku, but the Los Angeles Times version, created by puzzle master Michael Mepham, stood out as the most compelling," said Mary Elson, managing editor of TMS. "Sudoku offers a new twist on the puzzle concept, and it's catching on like wildfire."
TMS will syndicate a daily puzzle - dubbed "The Samurai of Puzzles" -- and difficulty will increase as the week goes on. The Monday and Tuesday Sudoku will be at a beginner white-belt level; Wednesday and Thursday advanced brown belt; Friday the expert black belt; then Saturday brown belt; and Sunday black belt.

Building on the immense popularity of Sudoku, Michael Mepham has produced several books of his puzzles. According to Mepham: "My first book of Daily Telegraph sudoku appeared in the best-seller lists [in the UK]. Not the specialist, non-fiction lists, mind you. Sudoku was in there, pushing aside the award-winning novels and biographies to reach… yes, the number one spot."

About Tribune Media Services
Tribune Media Services (TMS) is a leading domestic and international provider of information and entertainment products for print, electronic and on-air media. It distributes television and movie listings and related editorial content under the TMS and Zap2it brands; syndicates and licenses comics, features and opinion columns; creates and syndicates a variety of online information products; licenses editorial content from national periodicals; and manages national advertising networks. Through its Knight Ridder/Tribune partnership, TMS also markets news and features, information graphics and multimedia content. Headquartered in Chicago, with offices in Los Angeles, New York, Glens Falls, N.Y., Dallas, Milwaukee, Amsterdam, London and Hong Kong, TMS is a subsidiary of Tribune Company (NYSE:TRB). For more information about TMS and its products and services, visit www.TMS.Tribune.com.